Tag Archives | Brain

PZ Myers Calls Eben Alexander’s Visions Brain-Damaged ‘Bullshit’

By on October 12, 2012 in News 228

Harvard-educated neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander woke up one morning with a bad case of E. Coli eating his brain. Before he could say “alakazam,” his neocortex had shut down completely, while his incorporeal body was whisked away on butterfly wings into the depths of the Infinite Beyond. He saw visions, was given messages, and upon returning to consciousness, wrote down his story, which he summarized for Newsweek.

Upon reading this account, blogging biologist and professional party-pooper PZ Myers basically accuses Dr. Alexander of being retarded.  Relishing in his contempt for any Swedenborgian realities that may lie beyond atoms and the void, Myers wipes his ass with Newsweek on his famous science blog Pharyngula:

I’ve got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they’ve just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage.

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Simple, Brainless Organisms Store Memories Externally

By on October 11, 2012 in News 17

Barely-alive creatures, such as the slime mold at right, are able to produce “memories” — they just store them in their physical surroundings rather than a brain, Ars Technica has the latest news on the secret lives of simple beings:

Is it possible to know where you’ve been when you don’t have a brain? Depending on your definition of “know,” the answer may be yes. Researchers have shown that the slime mold, an organism without anything that resembles a nervous system (or, for that matter, individual cells), is capable of impressive feats of navigation. It can even link food sources in optimally spaced networks. Now, researchers have shown it’s capable of filling its environment with indications of where it has already searched for food, allowing it to “remember” its past efforts and focus its attention on routes it hasn’t explored.

In the course of studying the slime mold, some researchers noticed that the slime mold would avoid any areas covered in slime.

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A Neuroscientist Describes His Near-Death Visit To Another Realm

By on October 10, 2012 in News 402

Picture: Jesse Krauß (PD)

Proof of an afterlife, or simply that we really have no idea how the mind works? Via the Daily Beast, Dr. Eben Alexander recounts his trip to a higher plane of existence whilst his brain was shut down in a coma:

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.

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Foods To Eat To Enhance Your Dreams

By on September 28, 2012 in News 11

Are you wasting one third of your life by not living it to its fullest? What is the ideal diet to fuel lucid dreaming, vivid and intense dreams, and increased recall after waking up? World of Lucid Dreaming has the answers:

A double-blind study revealed that participants who took a daily 250mg B6 supplement reported a significant increase in dream content – as measured in dream vividness, bizarreness, emotionality and color. One of the roles of vitamin B6 is to convert the essential amino acid tryptophan into serotonin and niacin. This helps the body regulate appetite, sleep patterns and mood. Low levels of tryptophan are also linked with poor dream recall.

When you’re ready to begin the dream-intensity challenge, take your vitamin B6 supplement and then fuel the fire with plenty of tryptophan-rich foods such as:

Chicken (4 oz) gives 0.41g tryptophan
Soybeans (1 cup) gives 0.39g tryptophan
Turkey (4 oz) gives 0.38g tryptophan
Tuna (4 oz) gives 0.38g tryptophan
Venison (4 oz) gives 0.36g tryptophan
Lamb (4 oz) gives 0.35g tryptophan
Salmon (4 oz) gives 0.35g tryptophan
Halibut (4 oz) gives 0.34g tryptophan
Shrimp (4 oz) gives 0.33g tryptophan
Cod (4 oz) gives 0.29g tryptophan

I realize that list is a little meat-heavy, and if you’re a vegetarian it doesn’t give many options.

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Hallucinations Caused By Lightning

By on September 20, 2012 in News 10

A trope of pulp fantasy is the lightning bolt strike that grants its target strange powers. Mind Hacks discusses how this occurred, in a sense, when a healthy 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by lightning and suffered impact to her visual cortex. After rescue and three days spent in a drug induced coma, she awoke to a strange world, thus described by the British Medical Journal:

These exclusively visual sensations consisted of unknown people, animals and objects acting in different scenes, as if in a movie. For example, an old lady was sitting on a ribbed radiator, who then became thinner and thinner, finally vanishing through the slots of the radiator. Later, on her left side a cowboy riding on a horse came from the distance. As he approached her, he tried to shoot her, making her feel defenceless because she could not move or shout for help.

In another scene, two male doctors, one fair and one dark haired, and a woman, all with strange metal glasses and unnatural brownish-red faces, were tanning in front of a sunbed, then having sexual intercourse and afterwards trying to draw blood from her.

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MIT Scientists Successfully Control Rats’ Dreams

By on September 5, 2012 in News 8

Our dreamtime seems to be ripe for tinkering. Via io9:

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat’s dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day’s events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of “dream engineering.”

Wilson and his team trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio cues…and…recorded their neural activity. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers once again recorded the neural activity of their brains [and] confirmed that the rats were dreaming of their maze navigating exploits from the day before.

But when the researchers played the audio cues from the experiment, they noticed a very interesting thing: the rats would dream about the section of the maze previously associated with the audio cue.

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Brain-Scanning Binoculars Tap Into Soldiers’ Unconscious Minds To Locate Threats

By on July 9, 2012 in News 8

A new breed of devices harnesses the power of the unconscious, unearthing realizations you didn’t know your brain had reached. Popular Science writes:

Soldiers scanning the battlefield for threats may soon get a new tool: a brain-scanning set of binoculars that can pick up on a soldier’s unconscious recognition of a potential threat and bring it to his conscious attention. It’s just one of many ways DARPA and other military research groups are looking to have soldiers mind-meld with their machines and materiel, and it demonstrates how remarkably close we are to deploying mind-control on the battlefield.

The specific binocular device that DARPA is developing is known as Sentinel (for System for Notification of Threats Inspired by Neurally Enabled Learning), and it basically uses the power of the human brain to scan and filter imagery in realtime, picking up on both what the soldier recognizes consciously and what his unconscious might perceive as well.

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A Future Of Fewer Words

By on June 28, 2012 in News 9

Today we use an ever-shrinking pool of shorter, simpler words as image-based communication eats up word-based language. Not long from now, we’ll be grunting and sending each other extremely complicated emoticons. Lifeboat writes:

An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end. Not only is the world using fewer languages, but also fewer words. Consider the rich vocabulary and complex sentence constructions in extemporaneous arguments of politicians in earlier centuries against the slick, simplistic sound bites of contemporary times.

The cell phone has become a ubiquitous, all-purpose communications tool. However, its small keyboard and tiny screen limit the complexity, type, and length of written messages. Because no sane person wants to read streams of six-point font on a three-inch video screen, phones today are built with menus of images up to the presentation point of the messages themselves.

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Frozen Brain Bank Thaws, Setting Back Autism Research Ten Years

By on June 13, 2012 in News 5

Yech, just imagine cleaning up this mess. Via the Guardian:

A freezer malfunction at a Harvard-affiliated hospital has damaged a third of the world’s largest donated brain tissue for autism research. In all, 93 donated brains were damaged.

A spokeswoman for Autism Speaks said it was too early to assess the impact of the loss, discovered last month at the McLean hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, but one scientist predicted it could set research on the disorder back by as much as a decade.

Two investigations are under way to determine how the freezer failure happened. While foul play was not being ruled out, it is unlikely because the collection was located in a locked room within a secure building accessible by one of two keys held by security staff and brain bank staff.

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Most People With A Mental Disorder Are Happy

By on May 23, 2012 in News 8

headA reminder that “normal” does not necessarily equal “happy”. Via BPS Research Digest:

It’s easy for us to slip into all-or-nothing mindsets. An example would be: a person has some psychological problems so their life must be miserable. But that’s a mistaken assumption. So argue a team of Dutch positive psychologists, who’ve studied over seven thousand people over a three year period.

Yes, those participants with a psychological disorder were less happy than those without, but the majority (68.4 per cent) of the mentally troubled said they “often felt happy” during the preceding four weeks. “The possibility of coexisting happiness and mental disorders is of clinical relevance,” write Ad Bergsma and his team. “A narrow focus on what goes wrong in the lives of the client and forgetting what goes well, may limit therapeutic results.”

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